I think my current place is more walkable by my own standards, due to factors discussed in 11. lots of places to go in my old neighborhood that I didn’t really want to go to, but others might.

Also, I think my suburban location was getting some points for being on a bus line that is largely useless except for commuting to the nearest downtowns, while the buses in my current location take me pretty much anywhere I’d want to go in new haven. Also, the grocery store was somewhat closer in my suburban neighborhood, but still too far to actually walk with a couple bags of groceries, yet only 1 minute closer by car.

But in any case, here’s an example where the suburbs don’t necessarily do worse.

do you have any reason to believe that there’s a reserve of pent-up demand for more walkable housing that’s not being met by the market?

The high price of land in these neighbourhoods?

Finally, regarding social separation, I gather that what you’re getting at is that gentrification of poorer neighborhoods is a major driver of social mixing. I agree, but I’m not convinced that the correlation between poorer neighborhoods and walkability is particularly strong. For one thing, poorer communities are often denuded of the kinds of amenities that make communities walkable—to say nothing of the effects of urban crime on walkability. And conversely, plenty of brand new, highly walkable “new urbanist” neighborhoods are springing up, geared towards thoroughly unmixed middle-class inhabitants.

Again, though, Jon’s posting didn’t discuss any of these alleged externalities. His posting was basically of the form, “see how easy it is to walk to stuff from my home—here’s a Website that’ll tell you how your home compares with other people’s by that criterion.” To me, that’s just a bobo version of, “see how spacious my home is—here’s a Website that’ll tell you how your home compares with other people’s by that criterion.”

Neg Ext 1: Car use. Cars produce CO2 and smog, and dependency on nasty oil states, and these are perhaps not fully incorporated in the price.

Neg Ext2: Roads, parking lots etc. These are ugly, and that’s a definite negative externality. People do not pay for them on an individual basis, so they might by over-abundant. Lastly they take up valuable space, but that might be priced-in in house prices.

Neg ext 3: car dependency leads to social separation, and that might be bad. It seems this is the point people are worried about most. Of course, if ‘walkable’ regions become 100% yuppified or Crookified, separation is back again, but at current levels a movements of middle-class people to walkable regions might increase mixing.

Am I missing an ‘externality’?

While some low-density neighborhoods no doubt use zoning laws to keep themselves the way they are, I see no evidence of a lack of willingness on the part of city planners to work around them to create high-density urban areas with lots of high-tax-revenue businesses. If there’s a limit to this process, it’s presumably the number of businesses and facilities that a given urban area can afford to support.

In short, the market seems to have no trouble catering to the public’s preferred tradeoffs between walkability and other desirable features. The vast expanses of unwalkable suburbia in most cities appear to me to be a product of people’s willingness to sacrifice walkability for other features, such as space, quiet and seclusion, rather than of zoning constraints, and I don’t see how they interfere with anyone else’s desire for a more walkable environment.

Harry or Theo, do you have any reason to believe that there’s a reserve of pent-up demand for more walkable housing that’s not being met by the market?

The crossing lights do not last long enough, and I’ve even heard the rumor that the buttons to call for crossing lights are not connected to the lights (like the “close door” buttons in elevators).

I would rather not cross one of these exurban roads, feeling like Tyrone Slothrop (the character in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow) when he blindly runs across a German Autobahn.

The profile of walkability is enhanced when you don’t have a car.

Like I say at the start, this is probably too optimistic. But it seems that you’re remark is pretty clearly too cynical, too.

The elevation of “walkability” from a more-or-less humdrum aspect of urban life for ordinary people to a fetish item for affluent vaguely leftish types—a tendency which this site appears to consciously contribute to—was surely key in bringing this regressive re-distribution about…

The result is laughable. Walkscore, or Google map or whatever input they are using, knows only about a third of what’s around my home. But it’s okay, they are doing their best. In my experience, the places I lived in in France and Germany tended to be pretty walkable, not so much in Tokyo but the rest of Japan (that I have seen) was okay.